Background

What challenge were you facing that Alation helped you with?

Kristie Allen (Director of Analytics):The team that runs Albertson’s loyalty program decided to showcase the power of personalization in digital media vs traditional print by digitizing and personalizing a traditional grocery store flyer that was scheduled to drop in a mere four days.

In a tight timeframe, we needed to:

Find the right customer data

Understand and trust the algorithms

Maximize the contribution of an off-shore team with speed and collaboration

How did Alation help with the project?

Kristie: The clock was ticking and we had no idea where to start. I was told that the data we needed could be found in “RTPP” in Teradata. I didn’t even know what that stood for. So I typed it into the Alation data catalog and searched for the term.

Not only did I then quickly understand the meaning and the data definitions, but I was also able to find related tables and queries, and get information on table columns, common filters and joins on the table.

This curated catalog of data simplified the process for the data analysts in California to pass the work to their peers in the Philippines and vice versa so the project could be worked on 16 hours a day.

Instead of email, we held conversations in Alation so rather than searching through email which is highly imperfect, all the information was right there next to the article and connected to the data. The conversations and articles also become part of the metadata which is searchable so there is no need to reinvent the wheel in the future.

Albertsons + Alation

The results of this project were:

Time-savings based ROI of $30:$1

Data analyst on-boarding time was reduced from 1 year to 2 months.

Data discovery was conducted 67% times faster

Personalized email resulted in 300% more redemptions than paper redemptions

$300,000 in additional funded redemptions

With Alation our analyst teams are now able to coordinate and collaborate across the globe using centralized process documentation while directly connected to a crowd-annotated data catalog.